Stupid Aliens

Only in Hollywood can an alien armada cross the vastness of interstellar space, in ships the size of mountains, yet be dumb enough not to install anti-virus software. So today we begin Year 3 of Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, and I am your host, the aforementioned Isaac Arthur. If you are new to the channel, possibly having clicked on the somewhat click-bait-ey episode title of Stupid Aliens, there are a couple things you should know coming in. First, I don’t have an accent, it is a spe

ech impediment, I have problems pronounce the letter R, as in Rascally Rabbits. For that reason, every episode includes closed captions subtitles you can turn on. Second, this channel does very in-depth looks at topics, the average run-time tends to be about 20-40 minutes, so it is usually a good idea to grab a drink and snack beforehand. One of our major topics for this year is going to be contemplating and discussing what alien civilizations might be like. This is a tricky topic because there

are not many things we can predict about alien civilizations, especially that would tend to be universal traits to all alien civilizations. We can say for instance that they are very likely to value knowledge, at least if they are technologically advanced spacefarers, because it is hard to travel in space without technology, a lot of it, and it’s hard to have that without valuing knowledge. We can’t be sure that would be a universal trait with no exceptions, but it ought to be common one. Altern

atively there are a lot things we can say ought to be uncommon, that we would not expect to encounter much in alien civilizations, basically because it is stupid. Sadly we have an awful lot of these in science fiction. Aliens who are technologically advanced but fundamentally stupid. The film Independence Day is a well-known example, aliens smart enough to construct and maintain a massive interstellar fleet but incapable of dealing with a simple computer virus. Now to be fair, any solution to an

y alien invasion is going to have to be a headscratcher that needs a lot of suspension of disbelief by the audience, because there isn’t one. If an alien armada shows up in orbit of Earth with the intent of killing us, especially if they don’t care about preserving the ecology and can use a Scorched Earth strategy, we will lose. Quickly too. No ship able to get itself up to near light speed lacks the energy to just torch the surface of a planet, and any technology that allowed them to circumvent

those energy needs would have a weaponizable component that permitted the same thing. Your typical interstellar craft ought to have energy supplies that let it shoot nukes at a planet like it was bullets from a machinegun. If they want the planet intact they whack it with a targeted virus that just kills humans or just dump tons of nerve gas down from orbit. So the writers have to take some liberties if they want to do a story about an alien invasion, unless it is intended to be a black comedy,

and a short one at that. Unfortunately we tend to absorb that, folks don’t realize it is flawed or if they do, it still wriggles its way into the brain by repetition. Now our focus today is not on Invading Earth but we will start with that. There are basically 4 reasons to visit Earth if you are aliens that I can think of and here they are: 1) To talk with us and get to know each other 2) To get our planet’s raw materials 3) To obliterate us 4) To acquire things unique to Earth Now the first on

e, that they want to talk with us, we will look at next week in the First Contact episode, though there are a lot of popular ideas for how that would go down that imply the aliens are pretty stupid too. Starting with the notion that after encountering them at random face-to-face, which ought to never happen, they’d misunderstand us and open fire. We’ll do that next time, but just to continue the theme for today, if you are an advanced alien species and you show up on doorstep uninvited hoping to

have a conversation, the onus is on you to do some basic research first about language, customs, and psychology. We certainly would, and we broadcast tons of TV and radio they could listen to first. The second one is Earth’s raw materials. Problem is that Earth does not have any raw materials that are not more abundant and more easily accessible elsewhere. Clearly no one is going around strip mining our area of the galaxy or we wouldn’t be able to planets around other nearby stars, heck we shou

ldn’t be able to see any stars if they were doing that, considering what we looked at in the Star Lifting and Dyson Dilemma episodes. There ought to be a chunk of the sky where there are very few stars and some visibly disappearing in recent centuries if someone is doing that and about to arrive here as the edge of an expanding sphere of mining activity. A few years back the movie Oblivion came out, and it was a pretty decent film, but in that the aliens had gone through an elaborate and unneces

sarily stupid effort in order to get an even stupider prize. They were mining Earth for it water, sucking the oceans clean. Apparently for the hydrogen which is even sillier, since hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the Universe. Earth is not the best place to get hydrogen from, as it has way less than the gas giants and also a much steeper gravity well then all the comets and small icy bodies on the periphery of the solar system. Anyone who just needed that much hydrogen ought to be leaving

behind a Dark Sky in its wake because they clearly want all of it. The same is true of any raw material, metals, oxygen, etc. Earth would not be your last stop to find those things but there are so many better ones that you’d have to be a moron to come here before you exhausted all of those other easier sources and it would be blisteringly obvious if someone was doing that. It would be like people living in the Sahara desert invading Australia to steal sand from their beaches. The third reason

is to obliterate us and that’s actually the most logical. They don’t care about our resources they just want us dead, maybe they don’t want the competition for the galaxy and kill that off before it gets advanced. Maybe they just don’t like us specifically. I already discussed how easy that is to do without ever landing and we’ve talked about weapons before, like the Nicoll-Dyson Beam or Relativistic Kill Missiles, that would make it so you didn’t even have to come into the solar system but coul

d instead commit genocide from the comfort of your own homeworld. The last one though is that there is something unique about Earth they want, and that presumably needs to be life itself or something made by life. This is science though not a comic book so Galactus isn’t going to show up to suck out our life energy, we haven’t got any. There’s not going to be any space vampires that feed on humans draining away their life essence and leaving them old withered husks. For the sake of fiction we co

uld assume maybe they want to eat our souls or something. I mean I like to think I have a soul, that would be neat, but I never seen much evidence for that let alone anything definitive, and I’d really hate to get definitive evidence of that from Cthulu showing up saying he’d like to eat mine. As to non-supernatural options, what have we got? You can rule out that they want to eat humans, even if their biochemistry allowed them to digest us humans are an awful source of meat, and they could just

grow us in a lab. I mean if I were an alien species who developed a freaky fondness for the taste of people I’d just ask for a sample of our DNA to help humanity research medicine, then use that to clone up some long-pig back at my homeworld of Cannibala 3 in the Gastronomy Sector. Everything on Earth can be replicated, so you don’t need to harvest people or cows or trees, you just come by and ask for two of every animal, or maybe a dozen or so for the genetic diversity, and you wouldn’t need o

r want to keep them just take a sample so you could get their DNA. You don’t even need big freezer banks to store that in, not that even a billion samples of DNA takes up much space, because you could just record the sequence digitally and print it back home. Faster that way too, a digital recording of DNA can travel at light speed, a frozen sample cannot, and they are the same thing. Your DNA is not physical, any more than a book is, it is a sequence of information whether its on a hard drive,

a paper printout, or a clay tablet. If you’ve got that you can build yourself some rotating habitats back around some star you own and fill them up Earth-life as a nature preserve, or a farm, whatever your civilization is into. The same applies for our art and literature, unless you’ve got some weird Collector complex that requires you have the original copy of everything or the only copy, you could just ask and we would give up copies of all our music and TV and such. I suppose they might be co

ming by to obliterate our art, but even as bad as Reality TV is I have difficulty believing anyone would invade us just to destroy that. They could offer it in trade for technology, or just demand it at gunpoint, though the former would seem more logical. If you are species that will spend centuries cruising to other planets to acquire their genetic diversity or art it kind of implies you aren’t the genocidal types. The other common one is they want to stop humanity destroying our own environmen

t, which is usually based on insane-troll-logic. Humans damage our own environment mostly because we are trying to survive. We burn fossil fuels because we have nothing better, we knock over forests to grow food, there are not many people who get kicks out damaging the environment outside of the strawman villains from stuff like Captain Planet. In the 2008 remake of the Day the Earth Stood Still we get an example of that. They don’t like how we’ve treated our environment, fair enough, most of us

don’t either, and both their means of arrival and punishment are things whose very existence allows them to easily fix the problem. I would love to see film or show sometime where the aliens show up, notice the environmental damage, and just shrug and say ‘yeah we had the same problems, here’s some technology that will fix that, and if you’ve got samples from any extinct species we can help you clone them back up too.’ If aliens show up here to lecture us on not burning fossil fuels, that had b

etter be followed five seconds later by them saying ‘oh, yeah, we also brought you blueprints for these easy to build fusion power plants, like the one on our ship and back on our homeworld, Smugness 4 in the Self-Righteousness Sector.’ Of course this invokes the notion that they might not want to give us their technology because we are not ready for it yet and might destroy ourselves, which seems like pretty strange logic when you have just shown up to express your dismay about how we are destr

oying ourselves already. I’d really like to meet the jerk who would go to third world village, point out that they have contaminated drinking water as a result of their farming and sanitation methods, but then refuse to share with them the blueprints for the various water purifiers we have on the grounds that the technology might destroy them. That’s another example of Stupid Aliens, with the invasion options complete, or arguably Hypocritical Aliens or downright Evil Aliens. We all get the reas

on why you handing people dangerous technology isn’t such a good idea, the problem is the specific justification is pretty bad. I did not invent the Atomic Bomb, neither did you, neither in all likelihood did the alien who shows up talking about how dangerous they are. We all three of us know how dangerous they are. Lots of scifi writers advance the ‘too dangerous’ philosophy, but I can’t recall any of them that were actual scientists, though I’d imagine some are. From my own anecdotal observati

ons the writers who tend to have strong science backgrounds generally think more science is good, even if it was acquired from aliens rather than invented by us. Probably because it occurs to them that it does not matter who discovered it, alien or human, because the other 7 billion humans did not. You don’t have to be a physicist or optometrist to know better than to shine a laser pointer in people’s eye, and you don’t have to have an advanced knowledge of viruses to know not to juggle fragile

test tubes labeled Ebola over a concrete floor. The upshot of being a scientists is you are pretty much always surrounded by folks who use stuff from your field that you know they do not understand, and that you also used to not understand, and yet they are using it safely and so did you back when you didn’t. That and it makes you acutely aware of how many critical components of your own civilizations operate using technology you don’t even vaguely understand either. Or other aspects of knowledg

e, not everything is technology. There probably are technologies our minds can’t handle, but odds are neither could the original alien brains of that civilization and they can handle them now because they cyborged up their brains, which would presumably work just fine for us too. You certainly don’t invade a planet for slave labor, not if your goal is actual labor anyway, that’s what robots are for. If you just like conquering people and oppressing them because you are a bit of Ming the Merciles

s or Emperor Palpatine sort, then yeah it makes sense. Of course you might stop by Earth because you need an army, and humans are aggressive and warlike and your species is much too enlightened for that. I’m fairly sure removing the ability to defend yourselves from your species does qualify as stupid, especially if you went so far with it you can’t even make robots to do your actual fighting for you. These are presumably the same aliens that huddle on their homeworld quietly for eons in a row,

I could see that. An occasional answer to the Fermi Paradox about where all the aliens are is that everyone is afraid that if they send out signals some big bad space monster is going to come by and eat their homeworld. Not an unreasonable fear on face value, but quite stupid. As we’ve discussed before, the cat is out of the bag about your civilization the moment you broadcast your first radio signals, there’s no point being silent after that. If you are planning to build a secret bunker on the

outskirts of town, it’s not a good idea to use heavy machinery and dynamite in the excavation process. Nobody is going to miss you doing that or forget you did it. So you might as well build your civilization up so it can have a lot more scientists discovering a lot more fancy weaponry you can put on all your many, many ships constructed around your many, many planets and space stations. Of course the genocidal aliens are always stupid too. I have no idea why they opt to linger in the dark space

s between solar systems and galaxies in the first place, I mean beyond the obvious Lovecraftian overtones of scary ancient hungry monsters. If I had an enormous irresistible armada and was trying to destroy all life in the galaxy, I’d have them spend their free time swinging by planets every few million years to sterilize them. Or better yet just cannibalize the planets to make more ships in my armada. I certainly would not wait for intelligence to develop, let alone radio signals. I mean all th

ose roads and canals and pyramids we built thousands of years ago already are quite visible from orbit. So if I did want to have my extermination fleet sleeping in between purges for some reason, I just park them around planets instead of the cold depths of space. Or even on the planet, just waking up every few thousand years to eyeball their environment for signs of intelligence. I probably would put them to sleep in between exterminations though, it would help to avoid their ethics mutating wh

ile they are sitting around with nothing to do but think about whether or not genocide was a good career choice. Pretty stupid hobby anyway, I’m never clear exactly why any of the critters want to wipe out all intelligent life. They obviously do not want all the raw materials in the galaxy for themselves, a full blown genuine galactic empire, a Kardashev 3 civilization, something we looked at last year, takes very little time to setup in the grand scheme of things and definitely prevents new lif

e arising on planets since by default you don’t have any planets in a K3 civilization. I mean to a K3 civilization a planet just look like a giant lumber store, it’s not a place you live, its place you go pick up material to build places to live. And any given one of those trillions of planets in this galaxy has enough raw materials in it to construct not just a big ship for each solar system in the galaxy, but a pretty impressive fleet for each one. There’s enough iron in Earth alone to make se

veral hundred trillion aircraft carrier sized ships. And you want big ships, that way you can include a robust IT department to prevent you from having your fleet destroyed by a computer virus made by a bunch of primitives who just invented computers in the last century. I’m just going to skip over any examples of aliens who travel across the length of galaxy for no other apparent purpose but to abduct people and probe their rectums. Perhaps proctology is a much more scientifically useful field

than I assume. There’s a few of these examples I want to save for next week’s episode since they are great examples of stupid aliens but specifically in first contact situations. Like the Minbari from Babylon 5, who apparently think the best approach to greeting people is to wave a gun around while shining a flashlight in their eyes. Or the Buggers from Ender’s Game, who apparently believed functioning spaceships were not a sign of intelligence. Both are explained as tragic misunderstandings tha

t resulted in attempted genocide against humanity. We’ll look at those next week. But one that comes to mind for today is aliens that wipe themselves out. I think the classic example of this is from the Forbidden Planet. This 1956 film helped make science fiction movies something other than low-budget B-movies they’d always been until then, and is still a great film even today, so if you haven’t seen it, prepare for spoilers. The movie features an alien race, the Krell, or rather a machine they

built as they have gone extinct, from their own stupidity too which is ironic since they actually had a device that could boost intelligence. In spite of that they built a giant machine that could give physical form to their very thoughts. Apparently no one stopped to consider that our thoughts include a lot of very nasty subconscious demons and nightmares. The Krell were exterminated by their own subconscious thoughts in less than 24 hours. We get something similar from the most recent Superman

reboot, the Man of Steel. I don’t mean the invasion plot itself, of needlessly picking a fight with Superman and humanity when their giant terraforming machine ought to have worked just as well on Mars or Venus. I mean more my surprise that they could even build a terraforming machine when in this incarnation of the destruction of Planet Krypton it was done by them over-mining their own planet core till the planet exploded… I also have no idea how such a thing would be possible, digging holes i

n a planet generally does not make them explode. Of course maybe they had long since converted their home planet into a shellworld, a concept we discussed early last year, but if they had it shouldn’t have been a civilization ending event, since you only do something like that to supply raw materials for construction of a Dyson Swarm, which kind of implies your home planet is just a very small if very significant chunk of your solar system’s population. You get similar examples with civilization

s that wipe themselves out from cloning fatigue, as we saw happen to the Asgard in Stargate, or the Mariposans from the Star Trek: the Next Generation Episode up the Long Ladder, one of the worst episodes of the series. Ignoring for the moment that it should not be tricky to keep original samples of DNA on ice, or stored digitally, to use to avoid copy fatigue, or even fix the problem after you have somehow ignored these options, you have to pretty stupid not to see them coming right from the ou

tset. My general notion is that any alien species that could be so stupid as to kill themselves off by any method that flat out guarantees extinction and should be noticed as a problem by even a random ten year old, probably should be assumed not to exist. It is sort of like with War of the Worlds – Pick your version, aliens again killed by viruses, only this time the old-fashioned biological kind. The only reason to land on a planet to attack it is if you want to keep the biology of the planet

intact, rather than just nuking it from orbit till it glows in the dark. So you would think some consideration would be given to what that local biology might do to you. Ignoring that for the moment, I do wonder how they crossed the vastness of space without having airtight spaceships and spacesuits that would presumably protect them from infection. Such being the case I can only assume the Martian invaders occasionally took smoke breaks in the middle of the invasion and didn’t want to smell up

the air inside their war machines so they went outside to light up. Okay, we will wrap up there. While obviously a lot of our examples today were decidedly over the top, in order to contemplate what we can know about alien civilizations, which includes what we can say they would not do, we need to rule out the incredibly stupid. By and large anyway, obviously civilizations do often act in stupid fashions, just look at us. The key point is that we always want to look at any cliché or stereotype a

bout alien civilizations – and we will have more next week – and ask ourselves if it actually makes any sense, and if not, why we would expect them to do it. Particularly if that expectation goes to include all civilizations not just one or two that are being bloody-minded about it. Because for anything to be a common trait, let alone universal one, among alien civilizations it has to make a lot of sense. Something we have discussed a lot in terms of Exclusivity and non-Exclusivity for the Fermi

Paradox. Next week we will continue this forward by looking at possible first contact scenarios with alien civilizations, both the first one we meet and from the perspective of it being their first meeting but not ours. To get alerts when that and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to like it and share it with others, and leave a comment or come join us over at the Channel’s Facebook Group, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur

, to discuss the topic more. Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!